"Bill the Galactic Hero" - читать интересную книгу автора (Asprin Robert)

"Affirm, affirm," Ugly agreed, bobbing his mat haired, warty head up and
down. "I need a woman and a drink." His whine became almost plaintive. "After
all, what else is there to want in the troopers outside of out?"

They thought about that a long time, but could think of nothing else that
anyone really wanted. Eager Beager looked out from under the table, where he
was surreptitiously polishing a boot and said that he wanted more polish, but
they ignored him. Even Bill, now that he put his mind to it, could think of
nothing he really wanted other than this inextricably linked pair. He tried
hard to think of something else, since he had vague memories of wanting other
things when he had been a civilian, but nothing else came to mind.

"Gee, it's only seven weeks more until we get our first pass," Eager said
from under the table, then screamed a little as everyone kicked him at once.

But slow as subjective time crawled by, the objective clocks were still
operating, and the seven weeks did pass by and eliminate themselves one by one.
Busy weeks filled with all the essential recruit-training courses: bayonet
drill, smallarms training, short-arm inspection, greypfing, orientation
lectures, drill, communal singing and the Articles of War. These last were
read with dreadful regularity twice a week and were absolute torture because
of the intense somnolence they brought on. At the first rustle of the scratchy,
monotonous voice from the tape player heads would begin to nod. But every seat
in the auditorium was wired with an EEG that monitored the brain waves of the

captive troopers. As soon as the shape of the Alpha wave indicated transition
from consciousness to slumber a powerful jolt of current would be shot into the
dozing buttocks, jabbing the owners painfully awake. The musty auditorium was
a dimly lit torture chamber, filled with the droning, dull voice, punctuated by
the sharp screams of the electrified, the sea of nodding heads abob here and
there with painfully leaping figures.

No one ever listened to the terrible executions and sentences announced in
the Articles for the most innocent of crimes. Everyone knew that they had
signed away all human rights when they enlisted, and the itemizing of what
they had lost interested them not in the slightest. What they really were
interested in was counting the hours until they would receive their first
pass. The ritual by which this reward was begrudgingly given was unusually
humiliating, but they expected this and merely lowered their eyes and
shuffled forward in the line, ready to sacrifice any remaining shards of
their self-respect in exchange for the crimpled scrap of plastic. This rite
finished, there was a scramble for the monorail train whose track ran on
electrically charged pillars, soaring over the thirty-foot-high barbed wire,
crossing the quicksand beds, then dropping into the little farming town of
Leyville.

At least it had been an agricultural town before Camp Leon Trotsky had been
built, and sporadically, in the hours when the troopers weren't on leave, it
followed its original agrarian bent. The rest of the time the grain and feed
stores shut down and the drink and knocking shops opened. Many times the same